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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Back in 2013, the Pew Research Internet Project found that 72% of internet users looked online for health information. This was well before the most recent update to Dr. Google. It’s only a matter of time that those health searches will end up going through some sort of AI solution (Siri, Alexa, Galaxy, etc) we bring into the home.

Imagine if we connected this font of health information and questions together with the healthcare establishment. What if your doctor had access to all of the health related searches you were doing? Might he be able to provide better service to you and your family?

Yes, I realize that this idea will be extremely controversial. There are some major privacy challenges and issues with this idea, but there’s also a lot of potential benefits. It seems a little bit hypocritical that we ask doctors to be open and transparent with our health records if we as patients aren’t going to be open and transparent with our medical concerns. Certainly, we should be able to control what and with whom we share this information, but I believe that many will be willing to share it with their doctors.

Yes, this will require a pretty dramatic shift in how our medical professionals will handle a patient visit. However, if I’ve been doing a bunch of searches around back pain, imagine how much different my visit to the doctor for an earache would be. Could that provide the opportunity for the doctor to talk to me about my back pain searches?

It’s fascinating to think how this is almost the complete opposite of the office visit today. I’ve seen doctors that wanted to only deal with one issue at a time. Those doctors have learned the special dance that allows them to avoid talking about more than the presenting concern. Many doctors learn essentially a new language that makes sure that they get in and out of the exam room quickly without bringing up the rabbit hole of potential health problems a patient might be actually experiencing.

That’s the reality of today’s medicine. This is what we pay them to do. That’s changing with things like CCM where a healthcare provider is paid to dig in a little deeper. It’s certainly not enough to fully change these behaviors.

Until the reimbursement fully changes over to doctors getting paid to keep you healthy, a doctor knowing your health searches won’t be of interest to most doctors. However, once reimbursement changes, a doctor will become much more interested in what’s really ailing you. Your online searches certainly will say a lot about your health, both physical and mental.

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